Friday, August 09, 2013

Bin, Cardiac HIll and projects

Shadows on a wheelie bin.

"They call it Cardiac Hill," says a woman, as we make way for one another puffing up Little Mount Sion.

Projects are important for the elderly. A neighbour travels today to Cumbria to buy an unfinished boat, which he intends to finish himself. He retained the rigging of an identical boat which he once owned but sawed up for firewood, and looks forward to making up for his mistake. He is 83, as good a carpenter as he once was a surgeon.

You have always had the most exotic address of any of my acquaintances. And now it seems your address has spawned an offspring; I didn't know that. I felt I had to Google. Turns out your address is even more exotic than I thought. ("... synonymous with Mount Moriah, the site of the binding of Isaac and the Jewish Temple.") I take it the s and the z are interchangeable. An Anglicisation?

My address? Too bland, too meaningless. The sort of name building developers come up with. Nobody would be inclined to Google that.

In his book A History of Mount Sion my neighbour the late Roger Farthing quotes, but does not give full credence to, Benge Burr who published the first history of Tunbridge Wells in 1766 as a likely source of the name: "One of the first houses built upon this hill was an alehouse to which the whimsical landlord, whose name was Mathews, affixed the sign Mount-Sion, from whence the name of the hill is derived". The other two Mounts in Tunbridge Wells, Mount Pleasant and Mount Ephraim are supposed to have originated during the Civil War with Oliver Cromwell's Puritain soldiers. Tunbridge Wells, it has to be remembered is a new town. Few if any dwellings predated the discovery of the chalybeate spring in 1606 after which a fashionable town grew up round what is now The Pantiles where the spring rises.

About Me

Compasses

Following their Handbook for Explorers collaboration on the Compasses site (link below), Lucy Kempton and I are working together on a new venture, Questions. This is a series of poems submitted by each of us alternately, and prompted in the case of each poem by the previous poem and a new question. It is a process of adventure and discovery. Join us for the ride.http://www.compasses-lucyandjoe.blogspot.com/